My goal is to implement this with a standard installation of Drupal (of course, with the addition of contributed modules). It has been at least ten years since I have programmed with PHP (which is what Drupal is written in) so I’m not going to be writing any modules myself any time soon. To this end, I have relied on the following modules:

Content Access

Node Reference

Flag actions

Rules

Views

FiveStar (Voting API)

These modules have allowed me to make some progress on my goals. In just a couple days I have implemented the following:

Students can submit a class post and define it as “For review”.

Students can submit critiques for any class post that is defined as being “For review”.

Students can see a list of class posts (designated as “Published&rdsquo;) sorted by number of comments (ascending) and publication date (ascending); this way they can see the class posts most in need of comments.

Students can submit comments on both class posts and critiques.

Students can vote on class posts, comments on class posts, critiques, and comments on critiques.

Students can individually bookmark any comment on the site.

Students can see a ranking of the content that is receiving the highest average voting.

Professors can mark any content as “recommended” for students.

I’ve been very impressed with Drupal and its modular construction. The above represents some pretty good progress in a short time, but work still remains:

I already see that the system is collecting information about how many times the student votes, comments, critiques, and writes. I just need to centralize the information so that it’s easy for the student and the professor to monitor and use the information.

The main work that I have remaining is constructing the lessons pages (and, of course, the content).

I have yet to figure out the information architecture for the lessons. I don’t know what modules to use, I don’t know whether to use node references or a taxonomy as a means for categorizing the lessons, etc. And I haven’t had too much success finding any type of large community of higher education Drupal users. They are out there, but it’s a pretty small group. Given the strength of the platform, I’m surprised.

Given what I have discovered about Drupal, I’m hopeful that this is going to change in the coming years.